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LETTER 



FROM 



GENEEAL C. F. HEMINGSEN, 



IN REPLY TO THE 



LETTEE OP VICTOE HUGO 



ON 



% fsrjjfr s itm gnhmm ; 



WITH 



lOBD D,D., PEESIBEOT Or DAETMOUTH COLLEGE 

NH.;Aro AN ARTICLE FROM THE LONDON ' 
"TIMES" ON SLAVERY. 



JieU) a?orft: 

DAVIES <fc KENT, PRINTERS, 

113 NASSAU STREET. 
I860. 






I 



INTRODUCTION. 



The following letter from the pen of Gen. C. F. 
Henningsen commends itself to the earnest attention 
of all lovers of the Union, particularly at the present 
juncture. The forcible arguments, based upon incon- 
trovertible facts, and the conciliatory and patriotic 
spirit which pervades it, induced its publication in 
the present shape, by those to whom Gen. H. is per- 
sonally an entire stranger, and without his knowl- 
edge ; in the earnest hope that it may meet that at- 
tention and consideration so richly merited. 



LETTER FROM GEN. HENNINGSEN 



to 



VICTOK HUGO, 



Kew Haven, January 2, I860. 

Sir — The name of Victor lingo suggests vaguely to all 
so-called Anglo-Saxons a distinguished poet, dramatist, and 
philanthropist. 

To the few among them who have enjoyed early famili- 
arity with bis own language, that name conjures up some- 
thing more. They recognize in him — what a more intimate 
knowledge of the tongue in which he wrote and of his writ- 
ings will one day enable their countrymen to appreciate 
and acknowledge — not only one of the gi-eatest of drama- 
tists and poets, but the greatest who has yet illustrated the 
literature of France. 

Translators you have none worthy of the name. Even a 
Voltaire could not understand a Shakspeare. It required a 
Victor Hugo to appreciate him, and — differing as the bent 
of your genius does from that of the bard of Avon — of all 
his copyists, great or small, most successfully to have imi- 
tated him where, perhaps unconsciously, you tried it. We, 



sir, have no Anglo-Saxon Victor Hugo to translate you. 
Your public career is familiar to us all. Tour champion- 
■ ship of liberty, of equal rights, of mercy, of universal broth- 
erhood and pacification — your undeviating course of self- 
sacrificing rectitude, your uncompromising war on all op- 
pression — the lofty aspirations of the Christian and philoso- 
pher — have needed no interpreter to enable us to venerate 
and admire your character. 

In the prosecution of your self-imposed duties your voice 
has recentl}' been heard on this side of the Atlantic. Ap- 
pealing to the American people, you plead at once for re- 
mission of the death penalty upon John Brown, and for the 
deliverance of the negro out of bondage. When Yictor 
Hugo speaks, two continents listen. As one of the people 
of that republic which you call "The Queen of an entire 
world" — as one of the atoms of which it is an aggregation — 
you have therefore given me the right to answer you. You 
will, however, feel, I trust, that no disrespect dictates ; but, 
on the contrary, the greatness of my respect for your char- 
acter and genius urge me to obtrude the following observa- 
tions. 

As might have been expected, you recognize the great- 
ness of this Union. "A glory of the human race," some- 
thing outmarching "Europe by the sublime audacity of her 
progress, and bearing on her brow an immense light of free- 
dom." But you urge that very greatness as constituting 
the magnitude of the supposed crime you deprecate and 
would avert. Brown's execution, you say, would outdo the 
first fratricide, and you conclude — "There is something more 
terrible than Cain slaying Abel : it is Washington immolat- 
ing Spartacus." 

To this suggestive sentence, which condenses into a few 
words a world of thought, I have heard a simple answer 
made by Southern men. To you it may appear flippant and 
frivolous, yet it embraces a whole theory on which tens of 
thousands not only conscientiously justify the course which 
you pursue and you condemn, but hold themselves in duty 



bound to follow it. It is simply this : " That Spartacus 
struggled to free white men, not negroes." 

In the early days of this republic, slavery was universally 
recognized as an evil, whereof, indeed, the sudden abolition 
might prove a remedy worse than the disease, but of which 
the gradual extinguishment was desired and contemplated. 
This view was more ardently adopted, perhaps, by eminent 
Southern men, as more deeply interested in the question, 
than by Northern men. They might justly doubt the expe- 
diency, or even safety, of liberating at once and without 
preparation, a slave population concentrated in a few States, 
and amounting to about one fifth of the population of the 
Union. But if they did not think the negroes fit, in mass, 
for emancipation, they did not doubt the negro's capacity 
of being fitted for the rational enjoyment of freedom. His 
improvidence and idleness were supposed to be the natural 
result of servitude, and it was believed that, like other races 
whom oppression had debased, he would, with its removal, 
assert his manhood, and learn to walk alone. 

But protracted discussion of this subject, by the light of 
increased investigation and by the experience of subsequent 
events, has entirely altered these convictions, and substituted 
for them others at which it may seem sad that men should 
have arrived, but yet not rationally to be avoided. These 
convictions, to which the most eminent Southern men who 
formerly advocated emancipation, became reluctant con- 
verts, now universally entertained in the South and shared 
by large numbers of intelligent men in the free States, are, 
that the negro race has a difi'erent, and, in some respects, 
inferior mental organization, certainly, to the Caucasian 
race, and probably to every other, and that he is wanting in 
natural capacity for freedom. 

To these conclusions they have been led by investigation 
of the condition of the negro in Africa, by his history in St. 
Domingo, in the British West India Islands, and in the 
Northern free States of this Union. In Africa, the negro, 
according to Egyptian paintings at least four or five thou- 



sand years old (and to wliich double that age has recently 
been assigned), has been, for at least the former period, in 
contact with civilization. He is still unchanged in type and 
in condition. 

The cultivation of the Egyptian, of the Persian, of the 
Greek, of the Cartliaginian, of the Roman, and of the Arab, 
have left liim what they found him — a barbarian, a savage, 
or a slave. 

Since the Declaration of American Independence, left to 
himself in Hayti, with the advantage of a large number of 
highly educated half-breeds to direct him, you know the 
savagery into which he has relapsed. Hardly has the gro- 
tesque despotism and virtual servitude which Soulouque 
imposed been superseded by the presidency of Geflfrard (said 
to be a bright exception to his race), when you have a hide- 
ous sample of Haytien civilization in the unprecedented 
murder of his unoffending daughter. 

In the West India Islands the free negro has rich lands, 
a congenial climate, and protection against self-imposed des- 
potism or slavery. In Canada and in the free States of the 
North, he is surrounded by highly civilized majorities, who 
extend to him countenance, sympathy, and aid. Yet, what 
is everywhere the result? Left to himself, he falls into bar- 
barism, despotism, and virtual servitude. 

Free, surrounded by white civilization, he undergoes 
moral and physical deterioration, and sinks into idleness, 
pauperism, and crime. 

Hence, it has been assumed that he is wanting in the ca- 
pacity both for self-government, and for the enjoyment of 
freedom in a manner beneficial even to himself, because un- 
willing, except under coercion, to labor, and deficient in 
providence and forethought necessary to sustain independ- 
ent existence north of the tropics, or to prevent relapse into 
abject barbarism within them. 

This conviction is entertained and acted on by that white 
population of the South who acknowledge the capacity (if 
not the fitness) for self-government in every man of the so- 



9 

called Caucasian race, whether Teutonic, Celtic, Latin, 
Sclavonic, Greek, Tartar, or Semetic. Hence they extend 
to him the hand of fellowship, and, holding themselves to 
be an aggregation of sovereigns, after a few years' residence 
proffer to him equal rights. To these privileges, in fact, 
until the recent Chinese immigration into California, the 
right of no creed, race, or color, excepting one, has ever 
been disputed or denied. That one race is the negro ; not 
the African, nor yet the black — not the Copt, nor yet the 
dark-skinned Hindoo, with straight hair and Caucasian pro- 
file. Exclusion from the white man's privileges extends 
only to the negro, and he only can be, or has ever been, 
within the Union lawfully held in bondage. He is physi- 
cally distinguished by feature, by thickness of the skull, by 
its covering of wool instead of hair, by a peculiar odor, 
and by a distinctive tissue of the brain when microscopic- 
ally examined. In bondage he was found by the present 
generation of Southern white men, having been originally 
imported by Spain, under the auspices of the benevolent 
Las Casas, by France and by England, into their then colo- 
nies, or transferred by the N"orthern States to the Southern, 
when the former republics, finding slavery unprofitable in 
the North, abolished servitude by law, and got rid of the 
negro without sacrifice, by allowing their citizens to sell 
him to the Southern planters. Always known by those ac- 
quainted with him to difier as much in psychological and 
mental as in physical characteristics from the white and 
other races, the belief has become prevalent South, and is 
rapidly spreading in the North, that these characteristics 
preclude his emancipation beneficially to himself, from at 
least some kind of tutelage. 

A distinguished Northern jurist — Mr. Charles O'Conor — 
has recently, on a public occasion in New York city, ex- 
pressed the opinion that the negro requires, for his own 
good, the same restraints that the law everywhere enjoins 
and authorizes over minors up to the age of twenty-one ; or, 



10 

he might have added, allows and enforces throughout life, 
for their own benefit, over people of deficient intellect. 

"While European serfdom, in its varying phases, from un- 
mitigated slavery to the enforcement of a portion of the 
serf's labor, has shown that the white race will never work 
as efficiently under coercion as with free labor, the experi- 
ence of the last sixty years proves that the negro can not be 
allured by the fruitfulness of a Southern, nor driven by the 
rigors of a Northern climate, to work without coercion. 
Yet nature has not only endowed him with aptitude for 
physical exertion, but he thrives better under it than in idle- 
ness. Too far removed above the animal creation to be en- 
dowed with the provident instinct of the ant, the beaver, or 
the bee, he is asserted to be too low in the human family to 
have reasoning power enough for protracted or provident 
exertion. Hunger, like a master or an overseer, may oblige 
him to work to-daj'-, and induce him to look a week or a 
month ahead, but it is said to be as rare to find a negro who 
could look and work ahead for a season, as to find a culti- 
vator of another race who would fail to do so. Hence, 
where a straw hat and a breech cloth do not suffice for cloth- 
ing, and where the earth beneath a tropic sun is not yield- 
ing a perpetual crop of plantains, yams, or breadfruit, he 
must lean, at best, without a master, upon white civiliza- 
tion. In the few instances where he emerges from the pau- 
perism which, without the white man, would be starvation, 
he becomes a barber, domestic servant, oyster seller, cook, 
or, perhaps, whitewasher — occupations which, without the 
white man's industry and forethought, would have no exist- 
ence. 

It is universally asserted and believed in the South, that 
the average lot of the negro slave on a Southern plantation 
is happier than that of the negro in any other place or con- 
dition, and frequently his lot is exultingly contrasted with 
that of the poor white operative or laborer. I, sir, for my 
own part, am satisfied that the negro on a Southern planta- 
tion is, at least, less unhappy than the negro left to himself 



11 

in Hayti or in Africa, or than the free negro in Canada, in 
the jSTorthern States of the Union, or in Jamaica. iSTeither 
can I deny that he is better fed, better clothed, better cared 
for, and merrier than nine tenths of the operatives of Europe. 
I will not affirm that he is happier, but that he looks hap- 
pier ; because I know that no human being, unless utterly 
degraded, should, however miserable his condition, be will- 
ing to exchange places with the pampered white elephant 
of Siara, and because I believe that few starving white oper- 
atives, or M'hite tenants of a prison, would voluntarily be- 
come sleek, well-satisijed negro slaves. But though we feel 
that the higher the organization the greater the sensitive- 
ness to pleasure or to pain, from the lowest animal organism 
up to the lowest human intelligence — from the shellfish to 
the Bushman, or from the Bushnjan up to the most exalted 
type of Caucasian genius, how do we know but what the 
stolid contentment of the lower order may not compensate 
the rapture or acute suffering of the higher ? "We are sure, 
at least, that taking each according to its kind, what would 
be enjoyment to the one would be no enjoyment to the other. 

It is, of course, not worth M'hile, for practical purposes, 
ethnologically, to discuss a question in all probability eter- 
nally insoluble — that is to saj^, whether the white man and 
the negro sprang, aboriginally, from the same or separate 
stocks — whether the white man is a negro progressively im- 
proved, or whether the negro is a white man retrogressively 
degraded. Even though it were probable that time and cul- 
tivation might raise the negro into the white man, it is 
enough for us to know that fifty centuries have made no 
perceptible difference in the characteristics or the type of 
either. 

Neither does it appear that amalgamation of blood can 
effect this approximation. As there are a per-centage of 
white men whose weakness or obliquity of mind, or deprav- 
ity of heart, sink them not only below the average of the 
negro, but to the level of the animal, so there is a per-cent- 
age of negroes who rise, in most respects, to the white man's 



12 

level. These, it is true, are chiefly mulattoes, or what are 
called colored people in the South. Commonly inheriting 
the worst qualities of both races, occasionally they exhibit 
a large share of the intelligence of their white progenitors. 

But nature itself has barred the elevation of the negro 
race by this admixture. The mulatto is, in fact, a mule, 
with limited powers of propagation. That is to say, that his 
progeny, without recurrence to the black blood or the white, 
deteriorates physically and mentally, and about the third 
generation cease altogether to procreate. The germ of an 
inextinguishable animosity seems, too^ implanted by nature 
in the breast of the pure negro against the colored race, 
which, under favoring circumstances, fatally develops and 
leads him, as in Hayti, after he had driven out the whites 
by the aid of the mulatto,, next to exterminate him. This 
the pure black strives to do wherever he is the master, which 
his superior physical vigor soon makes him, as soon as the 
mulatto can no longer recruit from the white stock. 

The negro has, it is true, certain qualities which the white 
man may and does emulate, and which should and do en- 
dear him to the latter, but they are not of a nature to en- 
able him to walk unprotected and alone. He has unbounded 
hospitality. I have met, on the Spanish Main, industrious 
free negro emigrants from Jamaica, who told me that they 
could earn more in that island, but were compelled to leave 
it because their voluntarily idle relatives and neighbors ate 
up all their earnings, which they could not refuse them. 
On some plantations in the South the owners are forced to 
sacrifice Monday morning for the weekly distribution of pro- 
visions, because, if given out on Saturday, the negroes will 
consume the rations of a day or two to entertain their Sun- 
day visitors. The negro has imitative powers, a natural 
command of language, musical taste, and even talent, in 
which the Anglo-Saxon is deficient. When kindly treated, 
he has often strong attachment and fidelity to individuals of 
the white race. Negroes and negro women show frequently 
more disinterested affection to whites than to their own kin, 



13 

or even offspring. It appears natural to them to lean, as 
it were, for support, on a superior race, and this inclina- 
tion seems instinctive in the neg-ro. The negroes of two 
gangs recently introduced into the United States from Afri- 
ca — the one captured on the slaver Echo, and subsequently 
sent back to that continent, and the other landed from the 
Wanderer, and distributed through the South — seem to have 
been utterly divested of natural affection for each other; 
messmates, kindred, even brothers, would steal each other's 
food, and looked on each other's sickness, suffering, or death 
with apathy, and even with an idiotic grin. Yet several of 
the Wanderer's Africans attached themselves at once, with 
dog-like and disinterested fidelity, to certain white men, 
from whom the seduction of increased kindness was in vain 
tried to alienate their affection. 

The reprobation with which this attempt to reopen an 
illicit traffic would have been met by a large portion of the 
Southern white population was singularly modified by these 
considerations : Firstly, that it was soon after ascertained 
that the remainder of the gang from whom these negroes 
were selected was sacrificed at a barbaric funeral, as they 
would have been if not brought to the United States ; that 
for half the value of a negro in the South, the African chiefs 
offered to sell their own kindred; that in Africa slavery 
prevails, as it has prevailed from remote ages, to an extent 
which the exportation of slaves has been a comparatively 
insignificant cause in determining, even when that exporta- 
tion was tenfold greater than of late years. Lastly, because 
the trade, under another name, but really more objection- 
able form, is carried on openly and wholesale by other na- 
tions and notables, under the protection of the imperial flag 
of France. 

On the part of the white Southern population there exists 
a large amount of attachment to the negro, manifesting itself 
by a patronizing but affectionate familiarity. There is a 
total absence of that repugnance invincible to those not 
reared with or long acquainted with him. He is as acutely 



14 

sensitive to the one as to the other, and it is common in the 
Northern free States to see the heart of the escaped slave 
warm toward a Southern slaveholder, while it remains cold 
toward the sincere abolitionist, who has made sacrifices in 
his behalf — who calls him brother, who takes him as an 
equal by the hand, but can not conceal from his instinctive 
perception the repugnance which that touch inspires. 

Placed in authority over his own race, the kindliest negro 
becomes notoriously the most harsh of masters ; next to him 
the Northerner or European. Worst of all is usually the 
Northern abolitionist with his hired servants. He begins 
by treating them like white people ; he appeals to their rea- 
son and to their interest. But ignoring alike the character- 
istic failings and good qualities of the African, he is want- 
ing in indulgence for the one and appreciation of the other. 
He becomes disappointed, soured, and persecutive, like a 
driver losing his temper because he does not find in a mule 
the qualities distinctive of the horse. With such facts within 
their knowledge, with such experiences within their reach, 
and with such opinions universally spread in the South, it 
is plain that the Southern whites can have no intention of 
emancipating their negroes. The belief that sudden eman- 
cipation would be ruin, insurrection, and bloodshed, would, 
of itself, deter all from such a step. A minority, perhaps 
even gradually a majority, at the risk of or at the sacrifice 
of their own interest, might have favored gradual enfran- 
chisement. The conviction now universally entertained 
(the growth of recent years), that while the white man would 
be ruined the negro would be worse oflP than before, because 
incapable of being fitted for a state of unlimited freedom, 
bars even the prospect of progressive emancipation. 

Yet to a measure which the South conceives suicidal, 
Northern and foreign abolitionism attempts to urge it by 
three methods. Firstly, through the voluntary action of 
the white Southern population by means of discussion. 
Secondly, by obtaining, through political agitation, control 
of the three branches of the federal legislature and of the 



15 

federal executive, with the view of eventually enforcing 
abolition. Thirdly, by direct foray, and by raising the ne- 
groes in insurrection, according to the programme of John 
Brown. 

The first method, obviously ineffective, because it resulted 
in strengthening, as we have seen, pro-slavery opinions in 
the South, has been stopped by the virtual suppression 
there of discussion which could only disturb the negro pop- 
ulation. The second and the third, which inevitably lead 
to war, to dissolution of the Union, and to a slave insurrec- 
tion, the Southern States are determined to resist, conceive 
it is their right to resist, and are compelled to resist by the 
necessity of self-preservation. That their determination is a 
reality, no reasonable man can doubt. Their right is derived 
from the fact that the thirty-four States of this Union are 
thirty-four independent republics, united by a federal com- 
pact, by which, for their mutual benefit, they have stipu- 
lated only the surrender of certain sovereign rights, reserv- 
ing all others, and most jealously that of self-government, 
and of the regulation of their own institutions. They are 
compelled to resist, because a negro insurrection, whether 
as the means or the consequences of abolition, signifies not 
only utter ruin, desolation, and death, but death and worse 
than death, to mothers, wives, sisters, and children. 

This is what they conceive that abolitionism, either di- 
rectly or indirectly, proposes to force upon them. This is 
what John Brown brought to their own threshold. The 
proposed benefactor of the negro, they say, is not only the 
malefactor of the white, but the negro's worst enemy. It is 
certain that up to this time he has proved so. It is not 
true that the Southern whites have any apprehension of the 
negro if left to himself. It is the prospective aid and pres- 
ent incitation of the white abolitionist which constitute for 
them a danger against which they provide by every precau- 
tion which vigilance can devise. For years past, the avow- 
ed purpose of a portion of these abolitionists has turned the 
whole thought and action of the South on this question to 



16 

measures of defense against impending aggression. Every 
law passed since that time, with regard to the negro, has 
been a law of repression. Previous to that, for years, every 
law tended to ameliorate the condition of the slave. So that, 
if left to themselves, the Southern States would, in every 
human probability, so far have continued to mitigate the 
bondage of the negro as gradually to reduce it to a state of 
tutelage and modified coercion, which, until his nature 
changes, must, for his own benefit, be perpetually exercised 
over him — a coercion which, as a senator from Georgia (Mr. 
Toombs) has observed, the laws of civilized nations impose 
temporarily on one of the boldest, hardiest, and most useful 
classes of all free communities — the merchant seamen. 

We know the share of sea commerce in the commerce of 
the world ; we know that where otherwise only barbarism 
would be, it renders civilization possible ; we know its fos- 
tering influence on civilization, and how it renders habita- 
ble, regions which without it must be wastes. Yet what 
maritime commerce could exist, what ship would be sent to 
sea, if the law did not rigorously bind the sailor to labor for 
the whole voyage, and authorize, during its whole continu- 
ance, the enforcement of that labor ? 

The Southern States, when extraneous pressure ceases to 
threaten them — but, I fear, not till then — instead of occupy- 
ing themselves solely with defensive measures, will, no 
doubt, again turn their attention to the amelioration of the 
slave's condition, and one of the first laws in this direction 
ought to be the prohibition of his being sold or hired to any 
man who has not resided long enough in the South to insure 
his understanding something of the peculiarities of the negro. 

As my argument hinges on those peculiarities — as you 
have not been in the South, as you have no special acquaint- 
ance with the negro, and as your views are obviously de- 
rived from ex parte statements, I can hardly expect you to 
accept those which I have laid before you, whatever be the 
conclusion to which thorough investigation may ultimately 
lead you. But the world is ruled less by facts than by men's 



It 

opinions upon facts ; and you must, at least, admit that the 
calamities consequent on the course you advocate, depend 
on the opinions entertained respecting these facts by large 
masses of men. The extent and character of their convic- 
tions, inquiry will show you that I have not overstated. 
You might say, and with sorrow, but with a full apprecia- 
tion of the nature of these ca.\a.mities, Jiatjustitia mat codum, 
if it were a question of the perpetual or long-protracted en- 
slavement of a race fitted, or with the capacity of being 
fitted, to be free. 

But consider, sir, the immense importance of that if^ and 
allow me, respectfully, to remind you how your noble aspi- 
rations have already led you astray. 

In 1848, like many other good and eminent men, you 
were in favor of universal suffrage. The veteran Dupont 
de I'Eure, I believe, alone of the Provisional government, 
mistrusted its expediency, although the fact that the Gazette 
de France^ the organ of absolutism, of the right divine of 
kings, and of the ultramontane party, had long been advo- 
cating the measure, was enough to invest it with suspicion. 
With organized and accurate means of information, the 
leaders of that party knew and reckoned on the difference 
between the intelligence of the civic and the ignorance of 
the rural population. The consequence was not only the 
overthrow of the republic, but retrogression from constitu- 
tional monarchy to despotism. The parish priest, the may- 
or, the rich man of the village, influenced these rural com- 
munities, not only to oblige the French Kepublic to turn its 
fratricidal bayonets against that of Rome, but to place, in 
this century, in France, an outcast upon the throne, in spite 
of more knowledge, more talent, and more public virtue 
than ever were concentrated in Athens or in Kome. The 
Emperor of the French is, no doubt, restrained, as, while 
sane, every despot always is, and has been, by public opin- 
ion ; but can he disguise the fact that he, placed as he is 
above all law, could, with legal impunity, hang up the most 
illustrious Frenchman — you, sir, for instance, if he caught 

2 



18 

you — by the heels till you were dead, while a Southern plan- 
ter perpetrating on a negro a like offense, would swing in- 
evitably by the neck. 

Yet, if any should doubt— as it is not unreasonable that 
many should— the capacity of the European masses for self- 
government on the basis of that universal suffrage, let them 
turn to this country. There is not a race, not a nationality, 
unrepresented in this Union. Yet, in education, the vast 
immigration of the United States is below the average of the 
countries whence it emigrated. Like the rest of the white 
race who have crossed the Atlantic to people this continent, 
it has been above the average of the Old World in adven- 
turous spirit, while leavened with an amount of improvi- 
dence or criminality which has inflicted on the new republic 
the chief part of its pauperism and crime. Hence every 
element of turbulence and anarchy existed in a higher de- 
gree than in the Old World. Yet these emigrants, though 
a vast majority of them were without political rights at 
home, after a five years' residence, have their vote in the 
government of the Union and most of the States, on the 
principle of universal suffrage, without more abusing this 
privilege than native-born citizens. 

Hence the aptitude or capacity of the European masses 
for self-government, by universal suffrage, is plainly demon- 
strated, but not their fitness. A portion of that fitness they 
acquire by five years' residence, and the ignorance of a mi- 
nority of voters is modified by the experience of majorities, 
which they in time acquire. With the quick apprehension 
of the French people, if the means of information had pre- 
ceded the right of universal suffrage in the rural districts, 
you, sir, would not have been in exile, nor the nephew of 
his uncle upon the tlirone. You, a poet, in common with 
the political economists, Bright and Cobden, believed in 
and advocated general disarmament and universal peace — a 
state of things to which humanity is no doubt progressively 
tending, but still obviously very far remote. But could 
you, sir, if the past were present, Frenchman as you are, in 



19 

that exile wliicli so much honors you, advise the country 
affording you a niggardly hospitality, which does her so lit- 
tle honor, to disarm, as your Peace Congress did advise, or 
even cease the augmentation of her armament to the fullest 
measure of defensive security ? In a Christian, in a philan- 
thropic, and a philosophic spirit, you advocate abolition of 
the death penalty, by the just repudiation of all idea of re- 
venge in punishment. The unanswerable arguments of your 
school are, that the only legitimate objects of punishment 
being to reform the criminal or to deter from crime by ex- 
ample, it is impossible for a dead man to amend, and that 
more are deterred by the certainty of minor than by the in- 
creased severity of capital punishment, with its concomitant 
uncertainty. Above all, you insist on not visiting with 
death political offenses ; and herein you 'are followed by 
many who do not go the full length of your doctrine. But 
if ever tlie death penalty is universally abolished, is it rea- 
sonable to suppose that this abolition will be inaugurated in 
favor of an incendiary by a community living in a city 
stored with gunpowder? You would not have had the 
Greeks non-resistant to Xerxes, nor the Parliament to 
Charles the First, nor the American colonies to Great Brit- 
ain, nor the French Convention to the invading Allies. 
Some wars you are therefore bound to admit are justifia- 
ble. Yet how carry on a successful resistance without dis- 
cipline, and the martial law, abrupt, severe, and decisive, 
which enforces it? By that law, and to save innumerable 
lives, you are often compelled to put to death the guilty 
mutineer and the unfortunate sentry sleeping at his post. 
He watches while others rest, that he may afterward rest 
while they in turn are watching. Overcome by fatigue, it 
is often only the certainty of death which enables him to 
struggle against sleep, which, where sleeping sentinels pre- 
vailed, would soon be death both to him and all his fellows. 
Now, it is in the case of that community, and under cir- 
cumstances analogous to martial law, that the State of Vir- 
ginia finds itself. A political offender in Europe menaces 



20 

only the lives, the rights, the privileges, or the property of 
a few. A negro insurrection — a servile war of races — 
threatens the white population of all age, sex, and condition 
with imminent destruction, and against such a catastrophe 
the State laws of Virginia seek to provide, by laying down 
certain forms of procedure in punishing those attempting to 
excite it. Under these forms John Brown and his accom- 
plices were tried. You call on the free States to interfere 
to prevent his execution. Are you aware that you are in- 
viting them to what they have no more right to do than 
France or England have? That you are imploring them to 
commence a civil war, to break up the Union, and to at- 
tempt what every State within it would resist? 

For, sir, though every man in Virginia had been anxious 
for John Brown's death, if her laws only allowed a month's 
imprisonment in visitation of liis offense, and that the fed- 
eral government and the other thirty-three States had inter- 
fered to hang him, Virginia, the oldest State in the Union, 
would have risen to a man in his defense, as, under similar 
circumstances, Rhode Island, the smallest, and Oregon, the 
youngest of the States of the Union, would have done, re- 
sisting such intrusion even by- war to the knife. 

The economical view of emancipation in the Southern 
States is one that you may disdain. But if you will con- 
sider the magnitude of the interest involved you must ac- 
knowledge that no such sacrifice has ever been made, includ- 
ing even that unparalleled example which is at once the most 
glorious incident in the history of the British people, and 
the most complete vindication of the course pursued by our 
Southern population. 

Twenty millions of pounds sterling — one hundred millions 
of dollars — five hundred millions of francs, were voted by 
the people of Great Britain to free the negroes in their colo- 
nies. The result of that experiment has been that these 
colonies, once a source of wealth, are now a burden to her, 
and that the heavily taxed British operative is curtailed now 
in the necessaries of life to pay the interest of that debt or 



21 

maintain the establishments which alone prevent the eman- 
cipated negro from relapsing into savage life. Jamaica, the 
most considerable of these colonies, does not now produce 
more than a per-centage of what she exported or produced 
before emancipation, while its population of free negroes, 
after twenty years, notwithstanding extraneous accessions, 
has declined, while the slave population of the United States 
had increased sixty per cent, during the twenty years pre- 
ceding the last census. On landing in the island, the first 
sights that meet your eyes are the negro women forced to 
carry heavy loads of coal upon their heads by their fathers, 
husbands, sons, or brothers, who bask idly on the wharves, 
to coal the steamer. Out of a crowded thoroughfare, more 
than half the colored population whom you meet beg you 
for alms. Yet, are less coffee and sugar produced as a con- 
sequence of this sacrifice, by slave labor? On the contrary, 
statistics show that the amount of both these products, slave 
grown and introduced into Great Britain, is much larger 
than before. 

But, sir, the emancipation of the negroes in the United 
States, on the principle of compensation, would involve an 
expenditure, not of twenty, but of three or four hundred 
millions of pounds sterling. The interest on that sum at the 
rates usual in this country would equal the interest on the 
whole national debt of Great Britain. But that is not all. 
At least three out of the four millions, at which the colored 
population is now computed, must be supported. This, at the 
lowest estimate, would come to as much more — a charge it 
would be impossible to avoid, whether the negro were freed 
witli or without compensation to his owner. The freed negro 
having neither industry nor providence to make a crop, must 
plunder, starve, or be supported. You will find that inter- 
est or compensation money, support of negroes, loss of 
Southern crop and of Northern trade to South, would be 
under-estimated at the enormous sum of five hundred mil- 
lions of dollars annually. Such burdens, impossible for the 
most prosperous community which has existed to bear, would 



22 

fall on the ntterlj'' ruined white Southern population and on 
the impoverished North. 

Yet these negroes, now better cared for than the majority 
of the laborers and operatives of Europe, besides earning 
their own subsistence, furnisli to Europe about two thirds of 
its cotton. Cotton, the cheapest article of human clothing, 
was, as the covering of the needy, and the substitute for 
more solid, elegant, or comfortable fabrics, once the synonym 
in your country of whatever was insignificant and mean. 
Yet have you ever considered what that cotton is, which, as 
the product of forced labor, you may probably regard with 
both abhorrence and contempt ? Cotton is the material out 
of which a mighty cable has been gradually but inextricably 
interwoven, not only with the destinies of this republic, but 
of tens upon tens of millions beyond it, so as in some mea- 
sure to have entangled in its web nearly all civilization. To 
sever it would produce new calamities, second only to the 
sudden and utter disappearance from the world of iron. The 
silk looms, the fine cloth factories, the potteries, the glass 
works, the manufacture of linens, shawls, laces, and of in- 
numerable articles of use or luxury, might vanish in one 
night to subside forever among the lost arts, without occa- 
sioning one tithe the ruin and desolation which the sever- 
ance of that humble cotton link would occasion. 

To Great Britain alone the Southern States of this Union 
export an amount of cotton exceeding the whole rental of 
the soil of the British Islands — though the agricultural pro- 
duce of that soil is of higher value than the agricultural pro- 
duce of the soil of France. It furnishes, directly or indirectly, 
employment to many millions of white men. The destruc- 
tion of the cotton crop of the United States would, at the 
lowest computation, drive into pauperism one million and a 
half of individuals in the British islands, and occasion uni- 
versal commercial bankruptcy in that country and in this. 
The cotton which these negroes of the Southern States pro- 
duce, clothes at least sixty millions of the human race, or 



23 

what is the same thing, clothes partially double or treble 
that number- 
But when these sacrifices had been made, or at least such 
of them as it was within human power to make, what at the 
cost of this wide-spread ruin would be the benefit to the 
emancipated negro ? To place him even in the condition of 
the Haytien or Jamaica negro inhabiting the tropics ? No ; 
to leave him on a soil and in a climate whose winter frosts, 
however light, permit only a perennial crop, and which to 
sustain human life require an amount of industry and fore- 
thought which unhappily he is not possessed of. It is the 
firm belief of all those who know the negro, that he could 
there no more sustain himself than the horses or the horned 
cattle of a rigorous northern climate could, if set at liberty 
and at large by the sudden extinction of their master, man. 
Left alone in the Southern States of the American Union, 
the emancipated negro must from these causes gradually and 
miserably die out, leaving at the end of a few generations 
only the bones of his race in the howling wilderness to 
authenticate his sad story. 

You may say, " Remove him to a tropical climate, then." 
But, sir, benevolent as you are toward all God's creation, 
if your father had bequeathed to you an elephant, entrapped 
from his native wilds in which he roamed harmlessly, in 
which for tens of centuries his kindred elephants had not 
enslaved others, nor sacrificed them by hundreds in funeral 
rites, if you conld not afibrd to feed him without making him 
work, if you could not afiford to restore him to a wilderness 
in which he could live, would you be blamable ? Left to 
himself, it is plain that the negro, with his strong local at- 
tachments, weak reasoning powders, and vacillating purpose, 
would not emigrate from a climate in which he must die out, 
to another in which he might vegetate. 

Recent laws passed in several slave States, based on the 
long known fact that the great majority of free negroes live 
in idleness and by theft, have obliged the free negro either 
to vacate the State or to choose a master. 



24 

Will you inquire how many have preferred slavery to 
emigration, even into adjacent States, where assured of aid 
and sympathy which would not be extended to a white im- 
migrant ? 

To remove the colored population would probably be be- 
yond the power of the white population, if they were, to a 
man, enthusiastic abolitionists, even in the normal condition 
of the Union. 

If that great Southern interest were willingly broken up, 
it would be as impossible as for you, if you had not where- 
withal to feed your hypothetical elephant for a day, to ship 
him back to Africa or Asia. 

I have, however, been making impossible suppositions, 
viz. : that the white race in the South, against their convic- 
tions, and against their interests, should become abolition- 
ists, and abandon to the negro willingly the soil, with all 
the wealth and civilization which the intelligence of the 
white man has created or developed, and which certainly, 
even in one single Southern State, not two generations old, 
exceeds that cumulated by the whole negro race (forty or 
fifty millions) to fifty and perhaps a hundred centuries. I 
have been supposing, even that against all probability and 
experience, the negro would not expulse and exterminate 
the small white remnant which might leaven his barbarism, 
and that he would not virtually reinslave and decimate his 
kind. 

But in fact even voluntary abolition by the Southern 
whites would involve the massacre of hundreds of thousands 
of men, women, and children. Abolition successfully forced 
upon them would add the horrors of internecine and civil to 
a servile war. It could only at best be St. Domingo and La 
Yendee re-enacted and intensified, with the certain disrup- 
tion of this Union, and the probable establishment of one or 
several military despotisms on the ruins of the greatest and 
most promising republic which the world has ever seen. 

It would bear the same relation to ordinary political 
change and revolution that the geological convulsions (if the 



25 

term may be allowed to express the subsidence or upheaval 
of islands or continents) do to the ordinary convulsions of 
nature, that is to say, to the tempests and tornadoes which 
devastate the earth's surface. As a venerable and eloquent 
Senator from Kentucky (Mr. Crittenden) has recently ob- 
served, that disruption would proportionately to its sudden- 
ness more aflfect the destinies of mankind than the last great 
political catastrophe, the fall of Rome, which, after cen- 
turies of gradual decline, plunged the world for ages into 
barbarism and darkness. 

Would you then, sir, encounter the certainty of most, and 
the probability of all, of these stupendous calamities, to place 
between three and four millions of negroes, at best in the 
condition of the Haytien or Jamaica negroes, or to restore 
them to the rule of a king of Dahomey ? 

I am, sir," respectfully, your obedient servant, 

C. F. HENNINGSEN". 



DR. LORD ON SLAVERY. 



Eev. Nathan Lord, D.D., President of Dartmouth (N. H.) 
College, has written a letter on the Harper's Ferry affair, 
to a Yirginian, who has published it in the Richmond (Ya.) 
Whig. Dr. Lord is now a man in advanced years — his 
age is about seventy-five— but he reiterates to-day the same 
principles which he has taught for the thirty years during 
which he has presided over Dartmouth College. He has 
heretofore published letters upon the slavery question, which 
obtained a wide circulation from the ability and force which 
characterized them. Few men surpass him in the cogency 
of his thoughts, his vigorous expression of them, and the 
-fearlessness and courage with which he maintains the right. 
He concludes this last letter, to the Virginian, as follows : 

"But whether we have democracy, anarchy, or despotism, 
we shall not be rid of slavery till the day of the Lord. Its 
existence depends not on forms of government, or philo- 
sophical speculations, or political maneuvers, or legislative 
enactments, or judicial decisions, except as these may tem- 
porarily change its name, aspects, or conditions, or vary its 
locations. The world must live on to its appointed period. 
It can live, as things are, only as it has lived, more or less, 
with all varieties of race, character, and condition. These 
will find their appropriate spheres and places, not accord- 



28 

ing to mere liuman judgments, but by God's providential 
ordering of Shem, Ham, and Japliet, agreeably to physical 
laws and the plan of moral government, in reference to the 
ends of the present probationary state. Wherever there is 
a place and work for slaves, there they will be found. All 
things are fitted to all other things, and general laws will 
have their course. Our only wisdom is to. study them, and 
live under them and by them, in subserviency to their mixed 
righteous and benevolent design. Without a miracle, I see 
not but that slaves will yet be called for in New England, 
and by New England men — slaves having the attributes, if 
not the name of slaves, and possibly in worse conditions 
than we now complain of in reference to the South. Why 
not, if our present government should last another eighty 
years ? For Yankees will not perform the menial work of 
life. They are above it now. The imported free servants of 
Ireland and other countries will soon be infected with Yan- 
kee independence, and have the means of living, above serv- 
ile work, on their own freeholds ! Then who will be our 
servants ? Shall we have Coolies or Africans to hew our 
wood and draw our water? And what form of government 
shall be over them but that which is adapted to their com- 
parative rudeness and imbecility, and conservative of the 
general system ? The children and grandchildren of our 
present Abolitionists may yet be first to institute a harder 
serfdom than has yet been known, unless, indeed, they 
should themselves be compelled to sell themselves for bread, 
and suffer the proper chastisement of their fathers' sins for 
their rebellion against the government of God." 



FROM THE LONDON TIMES, DEC. 28. 



We were not wrong in supposing that the enthusiasm for 
John Brown's memory would speedily die out, and that the 
vagaries of the Abolitionists would cause a revulsion of feel- 
ing in favor of the South. By the present mail we learn 
that the country is most indignant at the Bostonians, and 
they themselves seem not to be a little ashamed of their 
proceedings. The capital of Massachusetts was on Decem- 
ber the 8th the scene of a demonstration in favor of the 
Union, and the more sensible portion of the citizens had an 
opportunity of protesting against the doings of their Abo- 
litionist brethren.- The tone of this meeting was as patriotic 
and becoming as the speeches at "Tremont Temple" were 
the reverse. Mr. Everett, a man respected throughout the 
Union, delivered a speech which will, no doubt, produce a 
great effect in all parts of the Eepublic. lie showed the 
wickedness of Brown's attempt, reminded his hearers that 
the old man had long meditated raising a revolt, that he 
was aided by Abolitionist money, and supplied with 
Abolitionist guns and pikes ; that his ])lan was well con- 
sidered, inasmuch as he seized the largest arsenal in that 
part of the country, full of arms and occupying a good ])osi- 
tion ; and that liis enterprise only failed because the slaves 
were not ripe for insurrection, as they were represented to 
be. Mr. Everett then read extracts from the narrative of 



30 

the revolt in St. Domingo, to show the horrors which neces- 
sarily follow from such an outbreak as Brown sought to 
cause, and he might certainly have directed attention to the 
present state of the island as a proof of how little the world 
is likely to gain by the establishment of a negro common- 
wealth. Using the arguments which suggest themselves to 
every reflecting man, he called upon the people of the North 
to discontinue the system of provocation which they have 
used toward the Southern people, and to use all means to 
strengthen the Union, whicli Abolitionist madness had en- 
dangered. The reception of Mr. Everett was most enthusi- 
astic, and his eloquent appeal will no doubt produce the 
best effect both on his own neighbors and on the irritated 
Southerners. 

In many other places meetings have been held to express 
sympathy with Virginia, and abhorrence of such schemes 
as that of Brown and his associates. In New York a mani- 
festo to the same effect has been circulated and numerously 
signed, and there is no doubt that the feeling in the country 
will be such as to strengthen the Federal Government and 
the several Southern States against such malefactors for the 
future. In this result we most sincerely rejoice. Mr. 
Everett in his speech expressed apprehensions for the future 
of the Union, in which we should not have been inclined to 
share. But, as his experience and observation on this sub- 
ject have been very great, we must conclude that of late 
the party war has been carried on with a ^irulence which 
leads even people accustomed to American exaggeration to 
feel that there is danger; and, indeed, the attempt at 
Harper's Ferry most necessarilj^ has brought new considera- 
tions into the controversy. Formerly the North contented 
itself with attacking the planters in newspapers or speeches, 
and decoying away or giving shelter to their negroes ; but 
now the Abolitionists have gone a step further, and the 
crusade is for the slaughter of the white people, and the 
establishment of a halfcaste republic, after the model of 
the Central American communities. The Virginians may 



SI 

hitherto have been contented to live under the same govern 
ment as people who merely v»rote at them and preached at 
them, but when it comes to revolution and murder, the case 
is widely diiferent. The States which produced Washington, 
Jefferson, and Monroe might be excused for declining to 
descend to the level of Hayti or Costa Rica. Men of the 
purest English blood may well shrink from turning their 
country into a region in comparison with which Mexico 
would be gentle and enlightened. But there are still more 
pressing considerations. After all, security for life and 
property is the great object of society, and the Southerners 
have now been called upon to decide whether they can in 
justice to themselves, their wives, and children, live under 
the same federation with men who make no secret of their 
purpose to revolutionize the South by force of arms. It was 
boasted in Boston that from John Brown's ashes armed men 
would spring to carry on the war for the liberation of the 
slaves. The people of the frontier Southern States may be 
excused for taking these expressions literally, and demand- 
ing some guarantee that there shall not be periodical 
seizures of federal arsenals, incitements of the negroes to 
murder, and imprisonments of inoffensive citizens by Abo- 
litionist bands. The federal Union presumes the disarma- 
ment of one State with respect to another. Virginia and 
Kentucky have not men ready posted to protect them from 
invasion by their ISTorthern countrymen. It is not the duty 
of each State to defend itself against its neighbors, and when 
the necessity for such vigilance arises, the objects of the 
federation are gone. The Southerners may well say that if 
they are to be exposed to these inroads they must have their 
own army and navy to protect themselves, and that, how- 
ever much they regret the disruption of a nation which has 
existed in prosperity for eighty years, yet the necessity of 
self-preservation dictates this course. 

It is for the whole body of honest and reflecting men 
througliout the United States to unite in calming these 
natural fears. The union of the American people is of im- 



32 

portance not only to themselves, but to the world at large. 
To Englishmen the spread of our language, of our religion, 
and to a certain extent of our laws and manners, can never 
cease to be an object of interest, nor can we desire success 
to the fanatics who, in their wild dream of raising an inferior 
race, would imperil all that has been accomplished in the 
New World during two centuries of industry and genius. 
That the harshness of masters in the Southern States may 
be lessened, that the slaves may receive education and 
moral instiniction, and that ultimately slavery may be 
changed into a system by which the colored race shall enjoy 
personal liberty and the legal rights which are necessary for 
the preservation of life and property, we most heartily de- 
sire ; but anything further we can not join in seeking. "Well 
might Mr. Everett ask, "Has any one whose opinion is 
entitled to the slightest respect ever undertaken to sketch 
out the details of a plan for effecting abolition at once by 
any legislative measure that could be adopted ?" The 
Abolitionists would have the population of the Southern 
States turned into a mixed race, whites, blacks, and mulat- 
toes being on terms of equality, and constantly intermarry- 
ing; but if one thing more than another has tended to give 
to the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World the victory over 
the Spanish, it is that it has kept itself apart from the Eed 
and Negro races, and lodged power constantly in the hands 
of men of European origin. It has been fully proved, not 
only on the American Continent, but in our own colonies, 
that the enforced equality of European and African tends, 
not to the elevation of the black, but the degradation of the 
white man. We can not find any sympathy for those who 
would try in the United States the plan of a half-caste Ee- 
public, and we trust that the Federal Government and the 
right-thinking part of the community will protect the South 
from the repetition of such outrages as that at Harper's 
Ferry. 



54 Hf 





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